The release of the Barbie trailer earlier this year has had the effect of getting an entire swath of Americans excited about seeing Ryan Gosling in Day-Glo knee pads. Among a slightly smaller swath of Americans, however, the anticipation around Barbie — which officially debuts in theaters on July 21 — has had a different effect: It’s made folks super interested in Barbie-inspired fetish porn.
According to exclusive data from custom adult content website Clips4Sale, searches for the term “Barbie” on the platform have risen nearly tenfold, or 984 percent, since January — a few weeks after the initial teaser trailer dropped in December 2022. There are more than 15,000 clips tagged “Barbie” in the title or description, and most of the content falls into one of two categories: “bimbofication” or “doll fetish,” which were both introduced onto the platform in 2017.
“I’m seeing more and more girls bimbofy themselves,” says Kelly Pierce, an adult content creator who has been making bimbofication content since 2007, when she first entered the industry. She tells Rolling Stone that while a few years ago, customers seemed more interested in creators with “a more natural” look, the trend has turned toward creators who “look as Barbie as possible”: “They want the Nineties to return, when girls were ultra-feminine,” she says. “That’s what [customers] usually say. They want the ultra-femme, ultra-stripper look: blonde, big boobs.”
Pierce isn’t sure whether the impending release of the Barbie movie is responsible for this spike in popularity (though she did say that her fans got “really excited” when she tweeted her plans to rent out the Dreamhouse on Airbnb and shoot content in it.) But she’s not the only adult content creator who has been creatively influenced by the aesthetic: adult director/producer/writer/performer Siouxsie Q says she recently performed in a “Barbie inspired, doll-themed orgy” involving more than 20 people, which was produced by Playboy model and porn performer Ana Foxx. “It was so cool to be around all these intelligent, independent, thoughtful, bad ass entrepreneurial women as we fully embraced a pink, plastic, smooth brain aesthetic, in pursuit of the endless possibilities and blind optimism associated with being that kind of doll,” she tells Rolling Stone.
it’s undeniable that in general, the rise of the “bimbo” aesthetic on social media platforms like TikTok has been going on for some time, and has been documented at length (including in Rolling Stone). Increasingly, Gen Z creators are embracing hyperfeminine early-aughts style — think push-up bras, hot-pink Juicy Couture sweatsuits, and high ponytails — and refashioning the pejorative term into something more empowering.
“Bimbofication,” however, is an entirely different phenomenon. The term refers to a fetish for turning an intelligent, self-sufficient person into little more than a hypersexualized, vacuous blow-up doll. On Clips4Sale, videos catering to the fetish typically have titles like “Therapist turned me into sex-obsessed bimbo” or “mindless fuck doll bimbo training.” Occasionally, there’s an element of hypnosis involved as well (indeed, the Bambi Sleep files, a highly controversial set of erotic hypnosis audios catering to the bimbofication fetish, have been linked to consent violations, according to a recent investigation from Buzzfeed News).
Over the past few years, bimbofication has received increasing press coverage, particularly after a reverse bimbo transformation cartoon by an erotic illustrator on the website DeviantArt was reposted to Twitter without context, where it was immediately decried as misogynistic and offensive. (The fact that it has also gone viral on 4chan and other far-right forums where actual misogynists have posted it in earnest and devoid of context has not really helped matters.) But while there is nothing necessarily inherently political about the fetish, it is of course rooted in longstanding stereotypes about gender, sexuality, and femininity, which have also been perpetuated by the Barbie doll toy itself (and which the Greta Gerwig-directed adaptation appears to be pushing back against, if the trailers and interviews with Gerwig herself are any indication). As a result, bimbofication has been subject to immense debate on the internet, with many arguing that the fetish is inherently misogynistic or about robbing women of their autonomy.
Pierce, who is trans, has somewhat complicated feelings about whether the bimbo trope caters to cultural misogyny. While she says she has always felt most at home while embodying the aesthetic — before transitioning at the age of 12, she spent her childhood idolizing Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and wanting to look just like her — she acknowledges that its roots are “a little bit sexist.”
“They want this ultrafeminine, not real type of woman. They want this ultrafeminine ideal that only exists in their mind,” she says of bimbofication fans. “So I would say yeah, it’s based on misogyny … I try to remind them always I’m a person and I’m actually educated and not dumb. [But] it doesn’t really personally bother me, as long as they’re paying,” she says with a laugh.
But it’s also important to note that bimbofication is not limited to men objectifying women. In fact, many of the videos on Clips4Sale feature women dominating men undergoing the bimbofication process, and according to Clips4Sale, the number of bimbofication clips of women in a dominant role is about equal to the number of clips of women in a submissive role. Put another way, much of the content isn’t targeted at men wanting to turn women into Barbies; it’s targeted at men who want to be Barbies, or be dominated by Barbies.
“Contrary to what people might think, doll fetish and bimbofication content aren’t always, or even primarily, about men dominating women,” Clips4Sale creator relations head Avery Martin tells Rolling Stone. “Yes, there’s a domination aspect to it wherein the viewer or scene partner is controlling or dominating the person in question, but that plays with either gender. With bimbofication, a woman can be made to act like a bubbly airhead OR you can turn a man into a sissy bimbo. A woman can captivate a fan with her beauty, or transform him into a beautiful doll that she can play with.”
Pierce says that while the majority of her content focuses on her being a bimbo, she often gets requests from men “who are like, teach me how to bimbofy myself,” she says. (She sends them to the cosmetics brand MAC and to her friend’s website, BoobsForQueens, for prosthetic breasts.) Perhaps ironically, many of her fans also request that she make content where she dresses like Barbie and dominates them, or wears clothing that emphasizes her genitalia. “They want to be dominated by me, as a bimbo. They want me to be ultra-blonde, ultra-girly, ultra-Barbie-looking with big boobs and a cock and dominate them,” she says, adding that she’s anecdotally observed that many of these men tend to skew politically conservative. “That’s been my niche.”
Whether it’s linked to the press circus around the upcoming Barbie movie or not, it’s possible that the increasing popularity of the bimbofication trope could be prompted by plain old fatigue. With everyone so exhausted by the mundanities of everyday life, maybe we all want to be rigid, mindless, gorgeous, polyvinyl chloride dolls with nary a thought or care in our empty little heads. Whether we want to be Barbie or dominated by Barbie, there’s clearly something about that girly that’s resonating at this cultural moment — and Pierce, for one, is happy about it.
Before a year or so ago, she says, “I thought I’d have to change my look to make money again. I was doing lighter makeup, straightening my hair out, not wearing barrel curls. Now it seems like everyone is asking for big hair, big boobs. They want it all. And I’m much happier that way.”